Three conversations you have not had yet
Unit 3 of 8 · Lesson 2 of 3Index
Your three jobs came from transcripts. Now you need to hear them from people. There is no research panel, no budget, and Maya is nervous about you emailing customers.
Ask about the past, never the future
- Priya“Would you use this?” predicts nothing
Everyone says yes to be kind, even your mum. A polite yes about the future is not evidence.
01 · drawing“Would you use this?” predicts nothing - YouAsk about the last time
“Tell me about the last time this happened.” What someone did last week is hard to fake.
02 · drawingAsk about the last time - PriyaAsk what it cost them
Time, money, a workaround they built. If the answer is “nothing really”, nobody will pay you to solve it.
03 · drawingAsk what it cost them - YouCount to five
When they stop talking, do not fill the silence. The best sentence usually comes right after.
04 · drawingCount to five
How The Mom Test handled it
Doing it with AI, and where it breaks
Draft your guide, then have a model audit every question for leading wording and for asking about the future instead of the past.
It passes questions that are leading but sound neutral. “How important is budgeting to you?” assumes budgeting matters. Ask it directly which questions assume the problem exists.
Audit each interview question below. For each: is it about past behaviour or future intent? Does it assume the problem exists? Does it invite a polite yes? Rewrite every question that fails.
Build it
A screener, an interview guide, and three recorded conversations, with a page on which beliefs did not survive.
Zoom or Google MeetOtter or Whisper
The worked solution
Stuck, or want to compare?
There is a worked solution. Try the build first. Reading it before you have attempted anything is the fastest way to learn nothing.
Checkpoint
If you did the build, these take two minutes. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the part to go back to.
Moving on marks this lesson complete. Finish the build first, it is the part that counts.